Country property: Betting on barns

A Norfolk couple have invested more than £1.5m in their conviction that the market needs top-price, über-stylish holiday homes, says DOMINIC BRADBURY

Converting a barn is always a challenge. But converting five at once, inside and out, would test most people’s nerves. So would pouring a large amount of cash into a holiday-home scheme in a nervous property market.

Back in July 2003, Anthony Hudson, an architect, his designer wife, Jenny Dale, and two business partners bought five adjoining barns on the edge of Little Walsingham, a picturesque north Norfolk village a few miles inland from the coast. They paid £580,000 — and over the past two years they have spent another £1m turning Barsham Barns into holiday lets.

The couple had already converted two barns near their home a few miles from Norwich in 2001, and were renting them out as holiday lets. But properties near the popular coast, with attractions such as Holkham beach, are a tougher rental proposition.

Emma Hunter-Blair, of Sowerbys Holiday Cottages, says: “There is some saturation in